Author of THE NEVERLAND WARS and other Young Adult works

Time Has Always Been Relative

I think it’s funny how the scientists think they’re the ones that discovered that. Einstein had a big revelation that forced him to question the nature of spacetime as we knew it then, and lo and behold, he figured out that time was not inelastic, not rigid, not uniform…it was relative.

Any artist from the past thousand years could have told you that.

The poets all knew it. Time was fickle, it still is. It has always been impish in the face of human desires. It stretches on too long when we are hoping to travel through it quickest, but the moment we want to linger in a moment, to enjoy it to its fullest, time picks up the pace again. Time is a blizzard, every moment a differently shaped snowflake, and we are merely caught in the storm.

The outcome of an event changes if the experiment is observed? Of course it does! Have you ever watched a clock? It moves so much slower when you do. Seconds become minutes the way minutes become hours when you wait for them to pass. In contrast, as soon as you take your eyes off the clock, the hands whirl around as if possessed by some temporal wind, blowing them—and your precious time—away.

This is why, by my estimation, at least four months have gone by in the past three weeks. Intelligentia left for Europe, and has been eight times zones away ever since. I cannot tell you how sluggishly the calendar creeps by! As slow as a clock moves when you watch it, a calendar moves exponentially slower. To think I am longing for the end of the month just so I will be able to say, “Just two more months!”

He’s eight time zones away, so time passes for me eight times slower. I am quite certain that is how this works, and I’m pretty sure there’s a poet somewhere who will back me up on this.